Simple Halloween party ideas for children

This year, I began to think about how much my young children would enjoy a Halloween party at home. I didn't fancy the idea of inviting lots of people, but I have a friend with similarly aged children that we see regularly, and so with an empty half-term to fill I invited them around for a small Halloween party towards the end of the week.

The children were really excited, and I came up with lots of things that we could get ready in advance, so we had plenty of crafts and activities that kept us busy for several days!

Decorations

I have a small stash of Halloween decorations already that have been collected over the years. So we had some hanging pop up decorations, light up balloons and so on, as well as some of our own homemade decorations like the Hama bead witches and Halloween tree. I also bought some cheap black bin bags and we cut them up in strips and taped them across the tops of the living room door.

For the windows you could make some really simple spooky window pictures, a great craft that even little ones can help out with and so easy that you can make them to cover as many windows as you like!

Trick or Treat bags

Our first activity was to decorate gift bags for trick or treating. I found some plain bags in the party aisle at Asda and then printed out some suitable pictures from Twinkl - Halloween Size Ordering pictures (Twinkl subscriber resource) - for them to cut out and stick to the bags along with their own drawings.

Teddy Trick or Treat

Then we went trick or treating! I made a sign in PicMonkey to put at the bottom of the stairs, then we set up six Teddy Trick or Treating stations around the top floors of the house. We made doors from cardboard painted brown, and each one had a number on it. Then each 'house' was occupied by a teddy with a bowl of sweets which were all numbered the same, with one in each bowl for each child. The children had to find and visit each house, and take a sweet from each teddy.

Decorating biscuits

Decorating biscuits is always a fun activity for parties. I made the gingerbread biscuits in advance using a variety of Halloween themed cookie cutters, then just laid them out with some coloured icing and a selection of Halloween sprinkles (found in Asda) for them to have fun with.

If you want to take it up a level you can make some gingerbread mummies. Just make normal gingerbread men, then drip white icing over them to make bandages

Halloween photo booth

Inspired by these Halloween photo booth props we made up some of our own so that the children could take turns posing for silly photographs.

Feed the Monster game

I loved this super simple Feed the Monster game and so we made our own, ready with a selection of soft food from the play kitchen (you can spot my felt party rings!) for the children to try and throw into his mouth.

Themed party food

In the morning we made some cupcakes which I decorated with orange icing and some cupcake toppers that I printed out. I found them linked from here - Halloween cupcake topper freebies. They are just cut out and taped to cocktail sticks.

Then I just did the usual kids party food, but the children helped me to come up with suitable names for it, e.g. chocolate fingers became broomsticks, mini breadsticks became bones, carrot and cucumber sticks became fingers and little crisps were fingernails. I made labels for the food using PicMonkey and made little stands for the labels using Duplo to place around the food.

Happy Halloween!